


Five times Danny said he’d marry Steve (plus one)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: 5 Times, 5+1 Things, Drinking, First Kiss, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Marriage Proposal, at least something like it, kono and grace each get one speaking line, oblivious idiots, so like. canon-typical amounts of screen time and development for female characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25680799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny humphs. “Look, all I’m saying is, I think I’d probably have married you by now.”“I’d marry you, too,” Steve says.Or: An experiment in how many times you can say something before you have to put your money where your mouth is.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 25
Kudos: 364





	Five times Danny said he’d marry Steve (plus one)

**Author's Note:**

> There are some vague nods to canon in this that somewhat tie it to a timeframe, so possible spoiler warning for the season 5 finale and, uh, a plotline that happens between 7.18 and 9.07 that I won’t name because that would in itself pretty much be all the spoiler you’ll find about it in this fic. Not much canon here, lots of fluff.

###### 1.

He’s not in a good mood. Neither is Danny, of course, who’s been worried about Charlie’s health non-stop, so really, it’s stupid that he’s still coming over to Steve’s to hang out. All they can do is be miserable together.

Steve’s kind of tempted to tell Danny to leave, because it seems like only a matter of time before Steve’s going to be forcibly made to talk about Cath and the ring that is now in the top drawer of his nightstand, unused, but so far all Danny’s done is quietly make coffee. Can’t really show a guy the door for making coffee.

So Steve stands by the kitchen entrance, to at least retain the feeling that tactical retreat could be an option, and watches Danny. For a while, as the coffee is brewing, Danny watches him back. 

“For what it’s worth, if I’d been Cath, I’d have married you,” Danny says, during a break where they’re both watching the nearly full pot drip-drip-drip even closer to the finish line.

Steve waits a few drips, because it sounds like a setup for an obvious joke (“for your coffee machine, if nothing else”), but when nothing comes, he still gives the same response. “Not helpful.”

“Oh, you wanted me to be helpful? Should’ve said so.” Danny slams an empty cup down in front of him with a little more affronted force than necessary.

He’s never going to show it, but he does feel foolish. He waits in silence while Danny retrieves the can from the machine and fills first his own cup, pointedly, and then Steve’s. “Thanks,” Steve says, but leaves the cup standing there to get the milk from the fridge. 

He takes his coffee black, but Danny doesn’t. 

By the time the milk is back in the fridge door, Danny’s movements have smoothed out and lost their harshness. They’re back to companionable brooding, only this time with added coffee.

*

###### 2.

Steve is not much for lotteries. He isn’t as unconditionally opposed to gambling as the Hawaiian state law, but he likes games where he has some hand in whether he wins or not. Still, when Danny goes back to Jersey for a visit and loudly announces he’s going to win the Powerball, there’s a unique opportunity for ohana to get him to buy lottery tickets in their name in Jersey, and obviously Steve can’t pass at that point. 

Danny is playing, which adds an element of competition that has absolutely nothing to do with the millions of dollars in the jackpot.

Or maybe just a little. “You don’t need to be rich,” Danny (ten tickets) says, over shrimp at Kamekona’s (zero tickets, “because the expected return on investment is terrible, brah”). Danny points at Steve with a speared shrimp, like a newfangled crustacean-based intimidation technique. “I have a daughter, and worse, an ex-wife who loves sending expensive lawyers my way to fight me on custody agreements. I-” He very nearly taps his own chest with the shrimp. “-need to be rich.”

Steve, already finished with his dinner, is thoroughly entertained. This is completely worth dropping thirty-three bucks on Danny’s exact amount of tickets plus one. “Lotteries don’t assign prizes on the basis of merit. You know that, right?”

Danny doesn’t even respond to that. He’s already way past it, making his garlic buttered and sautéed shrimp dance in the sky. “You know what, if you win the jackpot, I’m going to marry you, so I can kill you, so I’ll get my rightful share of the money for putting up with you all these years.”

Kono (Steve’s exact amount of tickets plus one, of which Steve was unaware until Danny had already left Jersey) grins at them across the table. “See, this is why _I_ should win. Way less murder.”

Suddenly, Steve and Danny manage to agree fiercely on one thing: that’s not an acceptable answer whatsoever.

*

###### 3.

Restaurants are supposed to feed people, but nobody ever warned Steve the restaurant itself would eat up a ridiculous amount of time and money before you even get there.

Or okay, maybe they did. One or two acquaintances. Half a dozen.

Either way, time and money, those are the two factors actively working against them, so every once in a while, it’s nice to fight back. Saving every penny and investing every minute is what they’ve done for months on end now, so that’s the status quo, which is a guide to how not to rebel. Rebellion, in this case, lies more in the direction of taking an entire evening to do nothing except drink their way through a week’s grocery budget converted to liquor.

“You know,” Steve says, slumped on the couch and watching Danny very slowly and carefully refill their glasses with Steve can’t even remember what exactly. Lagav- Lagafull- Lala-something 16. Danny had it imported it from Ireland. It’s good. They’re hitting a point where the bottle is more laga-empty than laga-full, but that just makes it even better.

“Know what?” Danny asks, reminding Steve he pretty much abandoned his train of thought. 

He needs to do a mental sprint to catch it. “I keep telling people we’re basically married, and they don’t believe me.”

“Who’d you tell?” Danny speaks a little slowly, too, like he needs to put more effort than usual into producing words in a sensible order. It makes Steve pretty damn sure he’s not the only one that’s drunk.

“An old lady in the cheese section at Safeway,” he says, before he can get distracted yet again by Danny handing him his glass. He allows himself a little sulk while he sniffs the amber liquid. Smells the same as the previous glass. Tastes the same, too. Still good. “She laughed, like she thought I was joking.”

Danny throws himself back against the couch with enough passion that he almost spills his own glass. He holds it upright and very still for a few seconds, making sure nothing actually happened, and then picks up all that force and animation again and channels it into his words instead. “That’s stupid. That’s really stupid. We _are_ basically married. I’d marry you.”

“Yes! Thank you!” Steve feels validated. So very validated he’s not even sure if the warmth in his throat is the whiskey going down or the validation just generally being present. “I’d marry you too. I’d put on my dress whites and everything.”

“Dress whites or white dress?” Danny asks, and dissolves into snorty giggles, dragging Steve down with him.

*

###### 4.

Danny’s brain is a deeply mysterious phenomenon. It tends to chase its own tail in anxious little circles any time it encounters something that makes its owner even slightly nervous, which is something Steve doesn’t get at all. Similarly, Steve is sometimes completely thrown by the leaps it makes. 

Like when they’re sitting on his couch having a beer, still basically sober because the restaurant disaster is nothing but a distant memory, and Danny stares into space for a bit and then says, “If things were different, do you think we’d actually have been married by now?”

Steve quits staring into his own bit of space. That’s the kind of question that serves to bring a man back down to earth. “Different how?”

“I don’t know.” Danny gestures between them, like that’s where the fault must lie. “More heterosexual.”

Steve understands what Danny is getting at – if one of them had been a woman – but in context, it sounds a little off. “Isn’t that the opposite of what’s needed here?”

Danny humphs. “Look, all I’m saying is, I think I’d probably have married you by now.”

“I’d marry you, too,” Steve says, and lets his head loll back against the couch, because he assumes that’s the end of it.

It’s not. Danny sits up specifically to look at him askance, like he said something weird, even though Steve is pretty sure they’ve been over this at least a dozen times by now. “You would?”

“What?” Steve lifts his head. “Why is it okay when you say it, but when I say the same, I get a look?”

“I was using a bunch of qualifiers.”

“Well, actually,” Steve says, because he doesn’t think he needs to backpaddle here one bit, because he was definitely just saying the same thing Danny was only parts of his sentence were implied, because Danny had already said them, and he was just agreeing. He doesn’t get a chance to verbalize that point. Between one blink and the next he’s being kissed, right on the mouth, with an intensity like Danny is throwing himself off a cliff with not much more than rumors that there might be cool water to catch him at the bottom. 

Steve makes a noise in surprise, and then decides he’s maybe not that surprised after all, and before Danny gets a chance to pull back, Steve grabs the back of his head, reeling him in, catching him. It’s a soft landing.

*

###### 5.

They’re in their kitchen. It’s all very normal, except for how it’s not, because usually they’re not dressed like this and the curtains aren’t drawn because their friends and family and other guests are in the garden putting the last touches on decoration that they’re not even allowed to see yet because they said they’d let Grace and Tani work it out, who came up with far more detailed plans than expected. Steve’s been seeing a surprising amount of his botanist neighbor, so he assumes flowers are involved, somehow. 

Truthfully, as much as he appreciates the thought being put into it, he also doesn’t really give a shit. What matters isn’t the way the garden looks today, but what’s going to happen in it.

“Are you sure?” he asks, just to doublecheck. Never hurts.

Danny stops fiddling with his tie to give Steve the stink eye. It’s a little wobbly with nerves. “I said I’d do it, didn’t I? A bunch of times, even before that last one.”

Those nerves, they make Steve feel uncommonly wobbly in turn. “Yes, but are you sure you’re sure?”

“Are _you_ sure you’re sure?” Danny bites back. He’s forgotten about his tie, which is either good because it means there’s one less thing he’s actively worrying about, or bad because the tie is definitely left crooked after all that fiddling. “This would be a really bad time to change your mind, just FYI.”

Steve narrowly stops his hands from going for his own bow tie. He rarely has occasion to wear his dinner dress blue jacket, but he knows it looks fine the way it is, because his outfit is something he already doublechecked an hour ago. Done and done. “Of course _I’m_ sure. I was the one who asked you if you wanted to make it official in the first place.”

“You also keep asking me if I don’t want to pull out,” Danny reasons.

Steve has a whole lot of reasoning, too. “You did once say you’d marry me for my lottery winnings, and I haven’t had much success in that department so far.”

“I also said I’d kill you for your lottery winnings, so be glad.”

Grace, like she has a sixth sense for it, chooses that moment to open the kitchen door just enough to stick her face through. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a nest of intricate curls, but the arch expression she gives them is perfectly normal for when she catches them bickering. “No killing each other now. Far too many witnesses close by, and you both need to be out here in two minutes.”

“That’s my girl,” Steve says, which earns him a thumbs up from Grace while she mouths _two_ at them again in warning and closes the door.

Danny is, of course, pretending to be aghast at what he views as his daughter picking Steve’s side. “I _will_ -” Steve knows what Danny is going to say, so he doesn’t really need to listen and uses the time to reach out and fix Danny’s tie for him. Danny falls quiet at the first tug and watches, chin tucked into his neck, until Steve is done, when he looks up with much softer eyes and briefly touches Steve’s hands before they fall away. “Marry you,” he finishes, with a gruff gentleness that still manages to devastate Steve every single time. “I’ll marry you.”

Steve turns to face the door because he’s grinning too hard. He shrugs a little, trying to shake off some of those nerves that keep jumping from Danny to him. It’s a hopeless bid to pretend he’s totally calm and collected about this. “Alright then. I guess.”

“Cleary I’m going to regret this for the rest of my life, but I will,” Danny reiterates. He makes a two-fingered pointing gesture from his eyes to Steve’s and back. “Just you watch me.” Steve already is, because he usually is, but in the moment that doesn’t seem to matter much to Danny. Danny just keeps going, threatening a still grinning Steve with, “I’ll do it, you beautiful asshole.”

*

###### +1.

He does.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! You are great, comments are welcome, and I hope you have a nice day. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
